By then, Cornish’s nausea had subsided, though he’d begun to suffer from severe abdominal pain. A lesser man would have taken to his bed. Cornish, however, had no patience for any display of male weakness, particularly in a crisis.
Dr. Hitchcock had informed him that, in all likelihood, the coroner wouldn’t arrive until nightfall—an intolerable delay as far as Cornish was concerned, since it meant that Mrs. Adams’s corpse would remain in the apartment all day, in full view of her daughter. It was, as Cornish later put it, a most “unpleasant” prospect.1
Cornish had an acquaintance in the district attorney’s office, a fellow named McIntyre, who might be able to expedite matters. Throwing on his overcoat, he left the apartment and made his way to the elevated train at Eighty-first Street.
No sooner had he boarded the car than he was seized by an intestinal spasm so acute that he was forced to hurry off at the next station and find the nearest bathroom. After relieving himself, he continued on his journey, though he had to leave the train four more times in frantic search of a toilet.
It was nearly 2:00 P.M. by the time Cornish made it to the DA’s office. After a brief conversation with McIntyre, who agreed to telephone the coroner, Cornish took the trolley to the office of his closest friend, John Yocum, a chemist working for the United States Leather Company and a fellow KAC member. Yocum, who had boarded at the Adams residence before taking a room at the club, was shocked by the news and alarmed at Cornish’s dreadful appearance. Perhaps a drink, he suggested, would help settle his friend’s stomach. They repaired to a nearby saloon, where Cornish had a glass of whiskey and milk, which he immediately threw up. Giving Cornish his room key, Yocum urged him to go straight to the club and lie down.2
Ignoring this advice, Cornish first traveled to the Rose Street office of his cousin, Lewis, to deliver the unhappy news. Only then did he head for the club. Once again, the trip turned into an ordeal. He had just boarded the trolley when an explosion seemed to detonate deep in his bowels. Quickly disembarking, he made for the nearest saloon, where he shut himself in the bathroom for more than an hour. When he finally emerged, his legs were so wobbly he could barely walk. Eventually, he managed to make it to the club, where he dragged himself upstairs and collapsed onto Yocum’s bed.
Cornish had never felt worse in his life. He summoned an errand boy, who ran to fetch Dr. Wendell Phillips, but Phillips wasn’t home. Fortunately, another physician, Dr. Lewis Coffin, was visiting the club at the time. Hearing that Cornish was unwell, he proceeded to the room.3
He found Cornish shivering under the bedclothes, his face a ghastly gray and dark circles under his eyes. He looked as though he’d been sick for a month. Turning down the blankets and sheet, Coffin saw that the patient was tympanitic: his stomach was so grotesquely distended that he appeared to be pregnant, and he was belching intestinal gas. His pulse was weak and intermittent.
Concluding that Cornish was suffering from acute gastric enteritis, Coffin went downstairs to the telephone and ordered stomach and rectal tubes from a local pharmacy. They had just been delivered when Dr. Phillips—who had returned home to find an urgent message waiting—showed up at the club.
Working side by side, the two physicians threaded a tube down Cornish’s throat and flushed his stomach with a solution. The “return matter” was (as Phillips later testified) “a thick, ropy mucus, so thick and ropy that when Dr. Coffin put his hand into the vessel and then lifted the matter up, it would string out all the way down.”4
Another tube was then inserted into Cornish’s rectum and his bowels were washed out. Like the previous procedure, this operation produced a “most inordinate amount of mucus, almost exactly the same as the return flow from the stomach, with the exception that it contained some blood.”5
From the symptoms, Phillips was convinced that the patient was suffering from “irritant poisoning.” Cornish’s pulse was so weak that the doctors were afraid to let him get up to use the bathroom. Going home was out of the question. Coffin prescribed strychnine and caffeine to stimulate his heart, along with bismuth and salol to soothe the inflammation of his stomach and bowels.
The two doctors remained at Cornish’s bedside for about an hour and a half. Before returning home, Phillips took Coffin aside. Something seemed to be troubling him.
It was odd, he said. This was the second time he’d been called to the club to treat a case like this. He mentioned no names, but Coffin—a frequent guest at the KAC—knew he was referring to Henry Barnet.6